


Self to Self

by Ruis



Category: Original Work
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Drabble Sequence, F/M, Languages and Linguistics, Magic and Science, Original Fiction, Original Mythology, References to Norse Religion & Lore, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Tea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 10:58:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19722286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruis/pseuds/Ruis
Summary: Worthy of the best computer ever built, her code would be able to precisely calculate the size of new planets they might find, the energy of a single vibrating atom, the raw power of a solar storm… But what about the beauty of a melody, the lust of knives on skin, the pain of love left behind?Nine days and nights of debugging program code. One very special computer.





	Self to Self

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scribblemyname](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblemyname/gifts).



„Error, error!“ Two red lights blinked in a mad rhythm that probably constituted a dire warning in some machine language Alina did not speak. „Cannot parse the request!“ Lines of white text joined the dance, flowing over the dark background of both screens much too fast for her to read. Something inside the machine gave a primal howl. Pain, or maybe ecstasy, or maybe even both, Alina thought. Finally, just a second before she could press the emergency stop switch, everything went dark as if anticipating her intent. Sighing, Alina resigned herself to another long and lonely night of debugging.

She knew the language well, knew the syntax, the semantics. It was why she had been sent here, after all. And it was worth it, she thought. She would have sacrificed anything for the chance to once in her life speak directly to a system like this, to translate her very will to binary, have it taken up and amplified by something with true power. Leaving the planet behind seemed such a small loss in comparison, leaving her friends and acquaintances a mere afterthought. This was what she had been dreaming of. Now if only the computer were responding properly!

Standing up to stretch her legs for a while, Alina took a sip of tea from her favorite mug, the one she had stubbornly refused to relinquish even when everything else had been left behind. Gently, she touched one of the thick cables running from wall to wall like branches of some giant tree, as if any trees were to be found on the station. The computer hung there quietly, massively, an unresponsive lump of silicon. “Come on, talk to me”, she whispered quietly, almost reverently. When she rebooted the machine, only one of the red lights came back on. 

It was not broken. When she checked the lamp and its wiring, she could find nothing wrong with the hardware, nothing easily fixable. It should have worked. The machine hummed, clicked, and ran normally, if indeed there was anything like normalcy for a computer like this. Yet one of the signal lamps stayed dark, whatever she did. Changing the bulb had no effect whatsoever. She was not particularly surprised to find that unscrewing the other bulb did not change anything either. It should have worked, indeed. Feeling a sudden kinship, Alina smiled sardonically. It must be all in the code.

You could not write it like this, she realized with a pang. Oh, the program was good, no doubt about that. Worthy of the best computer ever built, her code would be able to precisely calculate the size of new planets they might find, the energy of a single vibrating atom, the raw power of a solar storm… But what about the beauty of a melody, the lust of knives on skin, the pain of love left behind? What about knowledge, about meaning, about the randomness of a programmer’s fate? With that thought, she began to rewrite everything from scratch.

From thought came code, and from the code came the memories. She saw again the magic of a sunrise, the symmetry contained in a single snowflake, the innocent wishes born of dreams. She saw again how she had met him, saw again the night they had made love under the stars, saw the ecstasy and pain. She saw love and loss and love again. Everything, she lived again, for moments, for the eternities it took. Everything she longed to forget, she turned into mathematics instead. Everything, she wrote down truthfully. Memories changed words, and the words changed the language itself.

Had it really been nine days and nights already? She would not have been able to tell in the station’s perpetual twilight, with only LEDs simulating sun and moon and stars. How do you read the future in that?, Alina wondered for a moment, distractedly. How can those lights guide my fate, how could they light my path? In a dreamlike state by now, she scrolled through everything she had coded before, variables and commands flashing before her eyes, the whole love story, beauty and pain written in computer language. Her mug shattered on the hard linoleum floor, entirely unnoticed. 

The tea spread, forming a small puddle around her feet, around some smaller cables, roots to the branches above. Alina never noticed the tiny sparks, the hissing of electrical snakes. Neither did she notice her fingers bleeding from small cuts, the pain entirely meaningless when under her hand, the keyboard sang her spells of formal logic, and the machine responded in unforeseen but beautiful ways. Words from words it was, following words, and none of them made sense to her anymore. There was knowledge, she was sure of it, comprehension, just barely out of her reach… Oh. There it was.

Alina stared at the line. “Sacrifice self to self”? She was almost sure she had never written that. She knew better than to use circular logic! And yet… Somehow, it had worked. When she switched the machine off and on again this time, the system booted without difficulty, although the alphabet flashing over the screen was one Alina did not know. Excitedly, she grabbed a pen and some paper and began to copy the sixteen signs that kept repeating themselves, forming words, sentences, meanings, merging with each other. The remaining red light blinked as if it were winking at her.


End file.
